Lay-Lay.
That’s what my 4-year-old nephew calls me because he has trouble saying my name the way most people say it — Brandon. When he first started talking, the “BR” sound was hard for him to make (go ahead; try it!) so he decided to go with “Lay-Lay.” Whenever he calls me that, I feel a sense of pride and love: I’m his Lay-Lay, I tell myself. How lucky for me!
A few weeks ago, he called me Brandon with a “BR” sound. My jaw dropped! “Who’s Brandon?” I asked him.
“You’re Brandon,” he said, giggling and proud of himself.
“But you call me Lay-Lay,” I told him. “You can call me Lay-Lay.”
Now if you know 4-year-olds, then you know they like to do Big People Things as soon as they can (and sometimes even beforethey can). Whenever Bennett picks up a new skill, he repeats it endlessly to make sure everyone around him knows he’s a Big Person. So when he realized he could say my name the way Big People do, he didn’t stop saying it.
“Bandon, Bandon, Bandon!” he shouted, unaware that he wasn’t totally including the “r” sound. The more I protested and shook my head, the louder he said it. We played this game for a few minutes before his 4-year-old brain decided to do something else.
I don’t have kids yet, but I do have a lot of nieces and nephews, and even though it’s exciting to watch them grow up, it can sometimes also feel a little bit sad. That’s because grown-ups miss being able to rock kids to sleep and put you on our shoulders and snuggle with you before nap time. We also love the way kids develop their own languages, like when Bennett calls me Lay-Lay.
Well, as I was reflecting on Bennett outgrowing his baby talk, I thought of something that St. Paul wrote. In 1 Corinthians 13—an important chapter where Paul talks eloquently about love—Paul says this: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”
The people who wrote the Bible often used metaphors and images to talk about God and Heaven, and that’s what Paul is doing here. He’s saying that sometimes, when we talk about God, we’re talking in kid-talk. But Paul looks forward to the day when he sees God “face to face,” because then he’ll no longer have to speak about and with God in kid-talk.
That makes sense to me. There are a lot of things about God that remain mysterious. While Jesus does show us what God is like, we still have to guess about some things. What does God’s laugh sound like? Do God’s eyes twinkle like stars? (Does God even have eyes?) Right now, without having seen God “face to face,” we have to try to answer these questions the best we can. And St. Paul thinks that our answers sound a little childish. He’s probably right.
But when I meet Paul in heaven, I’m going to tell him about my nephew Bennett, and about how he called me Lay-Lay, and about how his “childish” way of talking made me so happy. And I’ll tell him how I hoped that Bennett would call me Lay-Lay forever and that he wouldn’t grow out of his baby-talk. And then I’ll tell him that maybe that’s how God is with all of us—maybe God likes it when we talk like kids. Especially when we’re talking to God!
My job is being a theologian. I spend my days writing and thinking about God and teaching students how to do that, too. As a teacher, I help my students refine and decorate their language about God. Sometimes the way they talk about God is not helpful, like when they think of God as a judgmental old man who is just waiting to catch us making a mistake. Sometimes they’re already on the right track and I just give them a gentle nudge to keep going. But I realize that at the end of the day, all of our god-talk—even the oldest, wisest teacher’s—is never as grown-up as we hope it is. We’re always babbling a little bit. We’re always talking about God in ways that make sense to us, to the particular lives we lead in the particular places we live.
Here’s an example of god-talk that some grownups might consider a little childish. It comes from a sermon by a Jewish rabbi named Maggie Renig. God, says the rabbi, is like a grandmother waiting for us to visit her. Like our earthly grandmothers, God is a little sad that we haven’t called or visited in a long time. But if we did, she says, “God would usher us into her kitchen, seat us at her table and pour two cups of tea. She has been alone so long that there is much she wants to say.”
When I first read this sermon, my grownup theologian brain wanted to pick out what was wrong with it. God can’t be like my grandmother, I thought, because . . . because . . .
Because why?
A lot of what we learn about God from scripture—that God loves us, that God wants to spend time with us, that God takes pride in us—sounds an awful lot like grandma stuff. So why should we be uncomfortable comparing God to our favorite grandmother?
Jesus compared God to a father—he even went so far as to call God Abba, or Dad. At that time, calling God “Father” wasn’t something everyone did. Dads give us food and play with us and tuck us in at night, some people might have thought. What does any of that have to do with God? Well, Jesus thought it has quite a bit to do with God. In fact, Jesus thought that God being our father is one of the most important things we can know about God. So, if we can understand God by thinking of dads, then we can understand God by thinking of grandmoms.
I think that God is the kind of grandmom who gets happy when we visit her, who laughs with us when we make mistakes, and who smiles when we mispronounce her name. Grandmoms, like uncles, like God, love when we kids act and talk like kids.
This essay is part of the new column Childish by Brandon Ambrosino, which aims to bring kids into theological conversations. You can read more of Brandon’s columns here.
Image: Unsplash/Jessie Nelson
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